2010 Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe

We discover that the Phantom drophead coupe goes faster than the stink of how rich you'd have to get to buy one.

It’s always been easy to make fun of a Rolls-Royce. “At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise is from the ticking of the bomb planted by the IRA.” But drive a new Phantom drophead coupe and the wisecracks will, ahem, drop right out of your head. There is a 453-hp, 6.8-liter 48-valve V-12 making the car capable of zero to 60 in 5.5 seconds (much faster than the IRA moves these days) and producing a top speed of 148 miles per hour. Computer limitation keeps the Rolls from accelerating further. I did not quite reach limited velocity on the corduroy- and moon ­crater–textured squiggle of my local New Hampshire roads. Or, if I did, I’m not saying so within Google-reach of small-town police departments.

But I will say the Phantom goes faster than the stink of how rich you’d have to get to buy one. It handles with the educated precision of the Nobel Prize–winning physicist that you’d have to be to repair it. And, thanks to brake discs the size of precious and irreplaceable Edith Piaf original vinyl LPs (14.7 inches in front, 14.6 in back), the Phantom comes to a halt as abruptly as the fall in net worth among Rolls-Royce’s customers while the drophead coupe was in its poorly timed production-planning stage.

Combine the Phantom drophead coupe’s cardinal performance virtues with a 0.37 coefficient of drag (better than an E-type’s) and a six-speed automatic (two more gears than I can usually find when I’m trying to drive fast), and you get a car that makes you feel like you could win Le Mans. And you probably could win Le Mans, at least back in the day, before Gurney and Foyt and their Ford GT40 got into the act (and assuming Gurney and Foyt were driving your Rolls).

Such praise should come as no surprise for a car that starts at $448,000. It better be good. What’s shocking is not the enormity of the price or the enormity of the speed but the enormity of the enormity. A Phantom drophead coupe is almost as long and wide as a GMC Yukon XL and within one fat child of the same curb weight. Yet the Rolls drives like a Porsche—a Cayenne, at least. Wayne York Kung, product communications manager for Rolls-Royce North America, said it definitively: “The faster you drive, the smaller it gets.”

That, however, brings us to the conundrum of the Rolls. I can put myself, wife, three children, three dogs, and everything we own except the swing set in a Yukon XL. The Phantom has only two seatbelts in the back and less than a Camry’s worth of legroom. We’ll have to find our dogs a new home at a Pan-Asian restaurant and downsize family middle management. Muffin, the 11-year-old, has been blasting her iPod’s Miley Cyrus tunes through the car radio lately. Looks like she’ll be the one cashing in her 401k.

Those who are driving a drophead coupe to attract members of the opposite sex obviously aren’t getting to first base or they’d need room for the natural results of what they’re trying to get up to. And if sex isn’t the point, well, then, don’t people who drive $448,000 cars have friends? I do not object to an 18-foot land yacht. (Ostentation? Eight­een feet wouldn’t count for much among the yachty set.) But shouldn’t you be able to invite your pals aboard?

The cover for our Phantom’s convertible top is made of handsome marine teak—part of a $17,550 package, with the stainless-steel hood—that I’m told was inspired by the J-class America’s Cup of the 1930s. A sleek and fast “street sloop” is not unheard of. There was once a gorgeous 1929 Lancia Lambda tourer with three full rows of bench seats. You could give a ride to most of the remaining Republicans in Congress. And then you could take them someplace until they get a clue. But the GOP is going to have to really mess up in 2010 to fit in the Rolls.

MORGAN SEGAL

Maybe the Phantom drophead coupe inhabits a stratum above utilitarianism (the way the Smart Fortwo inhabits a stratum below it). Maybe the Phantom is simply a thing of beauty, an end in itself, automotive ars gratia artis. If so, Rolls-Royce had better get its ars in gear. Viewed side-on, the Phantom is indeed achingly beautiful. It’s almost as pretty when seen from above (no easy matter since the beltline is up around the elastic on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s shorts). The brushed stainless-steel hood and A-pillars are impressive feats of engineering and craftsmanship. But this metalwork seems aimed to appeal to the small group of people who are both hopeless car nuts and avid fans of the 1950s sculptor David Smith, who worked in similar abstract monumental shapes of steel. This group is so small that I think it consists of me and David Smith (whose welding skills were learned at the Studebaker factory). And David Smith is dead.

The updating of Rolls-Royce’s century-old Parthenon grille has an uppy-datey look unlikely to survive this decade. And the glowing brow and beady iris headlights belong in a Pixar movie. (They work, though. Flick the brights, and you’ve got your own private sunrise.)

I was pondering the rear, uncertain what to think, when a friend voiced his thought. “Giant Kia,” he said. It’s an idea which, once in your mind, never goes away.

The massive suicide doors that close themselves at the touch of a button make everyone go, “Oooooh.” The doors also facilitate graceful entrances and exits if you’re an obese person who likes to make everyone go, “Oooooh.” The top (with cashmere lining!) folds up and down in automatic origami. Nifty, but every butcher’s boy (assuming the butcher shop is doing well enough for him to afford a Mercedes SLK) has that going.

Should you want something that’s a pure object of desire—in the large and impractical department—you’ll need a 1971 Chevrolet Caprice lowrider or the Lincoln Futura concept featured at 1955 car shows or the 1941 Chrysler Newport Dual Cowl Phaeton once owned by Lana Turner. And one young lady, given a ride in the drophead coupe, did exclaim, “I feel like a movie star!” But that was our nine-year-old Poppet, whose My Little Pony collection indicates that she is not to be trusted completely in aesthetic matters.

The Rolls is not an occasion for the sin of lust. But how about avarice? Or vulgar display of success at committing same? If a Roller doesn’t say, “I’m so money,” then what does? Actually, a Gulfstream G5 private jet and a personal island to fly to in it. Financial crisis or no, a car that sells for less than an ugly house in the wrong part of Sherman Oaks does not announce plutocratic triumph. Rolls should probably pump the sticker on this ride. It’s not like they don’t have their crass thing on, with the RRs all over the car big as G-is-for-Gucci purse buckles in The Real Housewives of New Jersey. The 21-inch pimp rims have weighted hubs so that the RRs are always upright in case you’re trying to impress people who are too stupid to read RR sideways.

Still, 450 large is not “Kids, vacuum the car and you can keep all the coins you find.” I tried the Phantom’s price point on a cross section of society. New Hampshire is well-infested with “summer people” and has natives ranging from those with wind-energy devices bolted to their roofs to those with Rottweilers chained under their trailers. Among penurious gearheads such as myself there was a general agreement that spending this much, automotively, was a perfectly good idea—if we had it. But if we had it, we’d spend it on dozens of cars—fix ’em, keep ’em, swap ’em with our friends. Maybe we’d even start an outlaw sprint-car race team. Wealthy people gave comparable responses (minus the sprint cars). One woman of ample means, herself a car collector, pointed me to an ad in Hemmings offering a 1935 Rolls-Royce 20/25 drophead with a custom body by James Young and a very snappy yellow-and-tan paint job, for $89,500.

The rich and the poor enjoyed the Phantom, happily took it for spins and got a good laugh out of its unabashed over-the-topiary presence. The earnest, overeducated middle class was aghast. Those who worry about exactly how local their local produce is, give out homemade trail mix at Halloween, and express their dreams on their Prius bumpers were appalled. I don’t know why. Nothing is better proof of answered Hope or more evident of salutary Change than a Rolls-Royce in the driveway. Maybe these people are just grumpy because the 60 days of rain on their solar panels this past summer has led to cold showers at their houses. Whatever. If the purpose of the Phantom drophead coupe is to impress, I’m afraid Rolls-Royce is giving the wrong impression to the wrong people.

MORGAN SEGAL

So, who are the right people? I asked everyone, love or hate for the Phantom aside, “Who will buy this?” The answer was unvarying and unanimous: “One will be sold to Puff Daddy, and the rest will go to the Persian Gulf.”

The Persian Gulf isn’t a bad idea—nice top-down winter weather (absent sand storms), fine roads, and no speed limits for rich people. I was myself stuck in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, for several months in 1991. Sometimes I’d have my morning coffee in the shade of the mud fort at Hofuf, a hundred miles away. It only took 45 minutes to get there, quicker than the trip to the closest Starbucks nowadays. And I was driving a Toyota rental car. If you’re living in Riyadh and the only beer is 300 miles from you, in Bahrain, the Phantom drophead coupe is the way to go. Alas, with crude oil selling for less per gallon than store-brand bottled water, that leaves just Puff Daddy or P. Diddy or Diddly Squat or whatever his name may be.

Here is a swell car. It’s not perfect, but it puts some much-needed fun, frivolity, and glamour back into driving. The Phantom drophead coupe is like the 1936 fintail Buick roadster with coachwork by Bohman & Schwartz Co. that Cary Grant and Constance Bennett get killed in at the beginning of the movie Topper. And that in itself is a refreshing change from the excessive highway-safety consciousness of our times. Then stuffy banker Roland Young buys the repaired car and ends up haunted by these two hilarious, bon vivant, sophisticated ghosts—phantoms, if you will. We need to keep the drophead coupe going, too.

I have a plan. The following may seem like a strange thing to say to Rolls-Royce, but you need to gentrify your automobile. There are a lot of people with money in this world and only a few with class like Cary Grant and Constance Bennett. The way to sell an expensive item, in particular an expensive item of uncertain purpose, is to convince the people with money that the people with class wouldn’t be caught dead without, for example, small embroidered polo players over their left nipples. This is the genius of Ralph Lauren. Not to mention the genius of the Range Rover. As the Rolls marque’s BMW proprietors should damn well know, a Range Rover was just a clunky old Land Rover with a station-wagon body—about as inherently classy as an International Harvester Scout and, in its original British incarnation, not much more expensive. But the Queen had one! And the next thing you knew, so did every trophy spouse on five continents.

Just go with the boat thing. The upper crust is nuts for boats. Ditch the convertible top and spread an awning. Turn everything aft of the dashboard into a canvas-cushioned, wraparound cocktail deck. Put a green headlight on the right side and a red one on the left. Mount a mast. Fly a burgee. What the hell, add a tuna tower. (And, P.S., if the boat you’ve got won’t float, please give us a trailer hitch to tow the real thing.)

The genteel are also crazy about getting dogs to pester pheasants, partridges, quails, and whatever else is aflutter. Then they discharge double-barreled Purdeys in all directions, per Dick Cheney, at the lawyer. A shooting brake is more to the point than a drophead coupe. And here’s an opportunity for even larger alloy wheels (if such exist) to give your Rolls some clearance on the moors. Provide built-in kennels and attach an extra piece of stainless steel to the bonnet to make an uncomfortable seat for the gillie. Don’t worry that the pushy nouveau riche types who’ll actually purchase the car will have no idea what all this is about. They can mink up the dog pens for their Shar-Peis and use the gun racks to store rolled yoga mats.

MORGAN SEGAL

If all else fails, build a $200,000 Camperback to go on the Phantom. True, there’s nothing blue-blooded about camping. But being broke is aristocratic. In very, very patrician families, no one’s had a real job since great-great-great-grandfather quit trading low-grade opium for willow ware ashtrays in 18th-century Canton. Put that together with the rate at which the current administration in Washington is spending our national inheritance, and we’ll all be living in our cars pretty soon. We might as well live large